High Gravity Stout

[RW19]

Been lurking this forum for awhile while learning the brewing process. Me and a buddy started about 6 months ago and we both really like high gravity stouts. We've brewed about 10 different stouts. We had gotten up to about 10-12% on a couple of beers but I decided I wanted a 15%+. I'm not big on doing clone beers. Creating a recipe is part of the fun to me. Here is what I came up with.

5 gallon batch

18lb Irish Stout
8 lb Pale 2 Row
1lb American Chocolate
3 lb 60L
1 lb black patent
1 lb biscuit
1 lb Roasted Barley

2 oz fuggles at 60 min
2 oz kent goldings 30 min
IBU - 45
SRM - 40

WLP001 yeast (brewed an amber for a "starter" and used the yeast cake for this brew).

OG - 1.139 (target was 1.140)
FG - 1.033 (target was 1.034)
ABV - 16.4%

Grain efficiency was 65% brew house. We usually hit 80% or so with lighter beers but stouts are still a bit on the low side. Maybe because we're not sparging for all the sugar? I won't complain because the beer turned out exactly the way I had hoped. It's a good mouth feel with sorta a dark chocolate/ caramel toffee flavor. Excited to hit 16%+ also. I had also made a bourbon/oak tincture. Oak came out a little on the weak side, and same with the bourbon. In the 5 gallons, I added 5 oz of oaked bourbon. I'd probably use the same amount of oak next time, but increase the bourbon by 2 or 3 times the amount. You can't taste any bourbon. But, it's by far my favorite beer so far.

 

[SoCal-Doug]

Well lets start with efficiency... With a grain bill like that, expect the efficiency to go down. You have a couple things to try if it really bothers you (I don't know your system, so pardon me if some of this in not possible, doesn't make sense, or is redundant to your current processes)

Make sure your mash pH is between 5.2 to 5.6, if it's outside of that range, adjust accordingly.

Watch your wort SG during mashing. check it a few times. When it stops climbing, you are probably done. Use tincture of iodine to test it also. Dig deep into the grain in different locations for the iodine test samples. Make sure you are converting all the starches to fermentable goodness. If it needs 90 or 100 minutes to convert, so be it.

Double check your mash thermometer, compare it against some others at something around 150F. Verify you aren't accidently mashing at 165 or 140 [exaggerating of course].

During mashing (and some people may slap me for saying this), carefully stir/break-up the grain bed a little bit, about every 20 minutes. Just enough to redistribute and make sure everything is getting flow and there is no channeling.

Make sure you have an optimum grind on the grains. The husk should be fairly whole and the grain kernel should be in 4ish pieces.

Keep the sparge water as close to 168 as possible throughout the sparge to keep things loose and flowing nicely.

Check your SG at the sparge output at numerous points during the sparge. It will start high and start dropping. When it no longer drops, or is below about 1.025 (you might not even get that low, lighter beers we say about 1.010), you have gotten about all you can out of the grain. If you can, check your pH also, if it goes above 6.0 stop sparging.

If doing this overshoots your pre-boil volume, no problem, just recalculate (increase) your boil time based on your boil-off rate, and do your hops at the correct times for your recipe (i.e. you may need to boil for 90 minutes, but your hops still go in at 60)

Yeast... Consider WY3787 or WY1728. A little research will give you some other options for high gravity brewing. For fun, take a look at WLP099 (I think distillers use that stuff).

Use a good dose of yeast nutrient and definitely do a nice big starter. Aerate. You might even consider sterilizing an air stone and aerate every other day during fermentation with pure O2.

Have fun Let us know how the next batch goes!